In my experience, a person that manages programmers not only has to be a programmer, but an experienced industry programmer. How else are they to gain the insights necessary in order to manage programmers? We're not assembly-line workers. We're not even skilled-tradesmen -- the average experience-demanding Internet job ad notwithstanding. We're somewhere between engineers and inventors. We're like the non-fantasy equivalent of magicians.
Only twice in my 12 years in the software industry have I had a manager that was an experienced industry programmer. (One was male, one was female, FYI.) And those were the best two experiences of my life. The development teams were well-organized, the goals were realistic (but still tightly scheduled), and I actually got the answers to questions I needed answered in order to do my job.
I remember being "managed" by MBA types with "general technical backgrounds". What a nightmare.
One judged the worth of an employee by how many hours they put in, not how much work they did. My job was to get a PlayStation 2 video game running within the frame rate limit, and there was no documentation, no source-code comments, no institutional knowledge of the source code, and no institutional concept of why anyone would ever want any of that. Nevertheless, I did, in 5 weeks, what the other programmers in the company hadn't been able to do in 6 months. He fired me because I could only put in 50 hours a week without collapsing. Now I have a wonderful 5-week-long salaried position on my work record. Boy, don't I look good to potential employers now. Thanks, Randy.
But how could my card do something like repeat a frame that happened around a second ago? It would have to store it somewhere, and there's no storage on the card...therefore, it would HAVE to be the driver...no?
What you're describing may just be a problem with the Bt8x8 driver. I have a Bt8x8 card, and getting it to work well was a complete nightmare. I had to set gbuffers to 32 (i.e. allocate space for 32 frames in the kernel) to keep streamer from dropping frames constantly. And there was this weird artifact where a frame from about a second ago would suddenly get replayed. I never fixed that one. And video4linux will lock up the entire machine on some relatively common situations.
I finally gave up and bought a Canopus ADVC-300, which connects via FireWire, and doesn't rely on video4linux at all.
I was pretty disappointed with the experience. Still, in general, Microsoft is a lot crappier.
This is a great album by the way..."Aqua Regia" is one of the best uses of 30 minutes worth of CD media that I've ever heard. Team Metlay is the Internet's first supergroup...a bunch of e-musicians get together every year for a few weeks, and write, record, and produce an album, and have been since 1994 or so. Pretty eclectic stuff, for people that like the Mind/Body industrial compilations or MuseNet -- perfect for the Slashdot crowd, I figure.
Could I record what I hear at the Mall, and sell it?
Yes.
Assuming the mall lets you record something there. A cousin of mine in high school tried to shoot a student movie in our local mall, and the management kicked her out. If they won't even allow THAT...
The point of my comment was that very little is needed to implement proper team communication, and even the 3 simple steps I outlined are usually not present.
Also, those 3 steps can be implemented in the usual case of idiot programmers and clueless management, while your plan requires a somewhat more disciplined and competent sort of place...like a Fortune 100 company.
Based on my experience in the software industry, you don't have to go as far as to pick one of these pre-packaged development ideologies. You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.
Design documentation (i.e. what we're supposed to do)
Source-code comments (i.e. what we did)
Commit e-mails (i.e. how it changed over time)
(You can see how well I live up to my own standards here.)
To get a team of programmers to work together, one must actually implement the physical communication they need to mesh together and produce something that's greater than the sum of the parts. That means you need a method for bringing new programmers up to speed, and for allowing existing programmers to change projects or to contribute to projects, in a way that doesn't rely on other programmers (especially if those other programmers no longer work there). The three items listed above are all you really need.
The key is to actually do these things...in my 12 years in the software industry, I've seen these things done properly exactly zero times, and was even fired once after the company president told me they were never going to do anything like this, and that it wasn't needed anyway. Eeek.
I think we need to accumulate some "best practices" that require commercial software to meet standards of robustness, stability, and functionality. We then need to crush, kill, and destroy anyone who fails to meet those standards.
I wouldn't count on that happening any time soon. In my experience, companies don't hire for competence...they seem to want to hire employees that all get along fabulously as they run the company right into the ground.
Look at the rejection letter I posted in my journal for an example of what I'm talking about.
I may not like spam, but I realize that the First Amendment was designed to protect speech I don't like.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in their 1978 decision FCC vs. Pacifica Radio Network, found that freedom of speech does not imply freedom of volume. That pretty much covers spam, spim, telemarketing, and junk faxes, as far as I'm concerned, but for some reason the law isn't enforced like that.
That doesn't mean you can't use it! I've cited that Supreme Court decision when writing to ISPs regarding trolls and other net.miscreants, and have had accounts revoked.
Nowhere in there is there room for a command-line program that hasn't yet been written.
That's odd, I spend a LOT of time writing code that ends up in command-line programs. I wonder how I do that, given that you say there's no room for such a thing.
Just take a look on the open-source project where I write the most code, mjpegtools. It's the open-source MPEG2-video (i.e. DVD) creation package. You'll have to look at the CVS version to see my latest contribution, though; it's not officially released yet. It's called y4mdenoise; you can browse the CVS version here. It's a new temporal noise-reduction tool for digital video, that does such a good job of inferring clear images from several noisy examples of them, that it can make a videotape look like it came from a LaserDisc. No kidding.
You remind me of the head of the U.S. Patent Office in 1899, who said that everything that can be invented has been. I wish people like you would get the heck out of the way of people like me.
How will getting everyone to standardize on.NET save Microsoft? An open-source version of it (Mono) already exists, so unless Microsoft's licensing terms are better, I don't see how this will lock people into anything Microsoft-specific.
Perhaps millions of Americans, but it's a big world, and a lot of third-world countries are modernizing on open-source software. I think Microsoft is destined to be an America-only thing, like football.
Maybe this was just a rumor, but I heard that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the Windows NT source code base (meaning W2K and WinXP also) was lifted from FreeBSD. It's also my understanding that FreeBSD allows this sort of thing, so I'm not trying to accuse Microsoft of stealing or anything. But as far as I know, that's one big example of them using OSS in the way you describe.
The real question here is, of course, since FreeBSD is a decent operating system, if Windows NT/2K/XP is 1/4 to 1/3 FreeBSD, what the heck did you guys do to screw it up so badly?
Also, they've started releasing the source code to some of their projects on SourceForge, which may be their way of contributing to innovation.
Disclaimer: I am not a Microsoft fan. Actually, I hate their guts. And that's solely because of their low quality, not their business practices. Actually, I find their "predatory" business practices to be sort of hilariously brilliant.
The forums on ZDNet are filled with pro-Microsoft trollers. People like "No Ax To Grind", "Mike Cox", and "Loverock Davidson" have become infamous with their bizarre pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux messages. They're so out of touch with reality, they come across like some of the pro-terrorist commenters on Saudi Arabia's official news site about 9/11.
Let's face it: unless you are a superhero with genius of the caliber of Galt or Roark, you've probably given up on yourself too. (Or you will eventually:-)
OTOH, even Howard Roark had to work in the rock quarry for a while. That's about all that gives me hope these days.
Rand's pretty strong stuff, but you can still do OK in life by using it as a mixer against a base of Strauss and/or Machiavelli.
Who is Strauss? I know who Machiavelli is. I'll go buy a book today or tomorrow.
Treat life as a game. It's a fun game, whether you're keeping score with dollars or human lives. Or better yet, both.
If I'm forced to go down that path, I will make sure I do it so well & so thoroughly, that I'll make Gail Wynand look like a saint. I don't think the world really wants that, even though it deserves that.
If you're serious...
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...then please, for sanity's sake, buy and read "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines". You will find that Apple actually researched what makes an intuitive interface & then did a damn fine job accomplishing it. The current Linux GUIs suffer from the same problem as Windows; they're completely arbitrary.
I hate when background windows force themselves to the front on MS Windows, and it makes me sick to see that happen under Linux. I hate selecting some bit of text under Windows, only to find that releasing my finger from the button caused some last-second movement that totally screws up my selection. Linux's GUIs do this too. Macintosh knows people are human beings & it filters out last-second movements like that. And so on, and so on, and so on.
So please...if you're going to write a proper Linux GUI...HEED STRONGLY WHAT APPLE SAYS!!!
(Disclaimer: I am a major Linux head, but was once a Mac developer. OS X looks awesome, but unless Apple stops being the sole source of hardware, I'm not buying a Mac.)
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In my experience, a person that manages programmers not only has to be a programmer, but an experienced industry programmer. How else are they to gain the insights necessary in order to manage programmers? We're not assembly-line workers. We're not even skilled-tradesmen -- the average experience-demanding Internet job ad notwithstanding. We're somewhere between engineers and inventors. We're like the non-fantasy equivalent of magicians.
Only twice in my 12 years in the software industry have I had a manager that was an experienced industry programmer. (One was male, one was female, FYI.) And those were the best two experiences of my life. The development teams were well-organized, the goals were realistic (but still tightly scheduled), and I actually got the answers to questions I needed answered in order to do my job.
I remember being "managed" by MBA types with "general technical backgrounds". What a nightmare.
One judged the worth of an employee by how many hours they put in, not how much work they did. My job was to get a PlayStation 2 video game running within the frame rate limit, and there was no documentation, no source-code comments, no institutional knowledge of the source code, and no institutional concept of why anyone would ever want any of that. Nevertheless, I did, in 5 weeks, what the other programmers in the company hadn't been able to do in 6 months. He fired me because I could only put in 50 hours a week without collapsing. Now I have a wonderful 5-week-long salaried position on my work record. Boy, don't I look good to potential employers now. Thanks, Randy.
But how could my card do something like repeat a frame that happened around a second ago? It would have to store it somewhere, and there's no storage on the card...therefore, it would HAVE to be the driver...no?
What you're describing may just be a problem with the Bt8x8 driver. I have a Bt8x8 card, and getting it to work well was a complete nightmare. I had to set gbuffers to 32 (i.e. allocate space for 32 frames in the kernel) to keep streamer from dropping frames constantly. And there was this weird artifact where a frame from about a second ago would suddenly get replayed. I never fixed that one. And video4linux will lock up the entire machine on some relatively common situations.
I finally gave up and bought a Canopus ADVC-300, which connects via FireWire, and doesn't rely on video4linux at all.
I was pretty disappointed with the experience. Still, in general, Microsoft is a lot crappier.
Imagine that.
The hamsters' music sounds something like the Team Metlay album Ballistic. Especially a song like Trajectory
This is a great album by the way..."Aqua Regia" is one of the best uses of 30 minutes worth of CD media that I've ever heard. Team Metlay is the Internet's first supergroup...a bunch of e-musicians get together every year for a few weeks, and write, record, and produce an album, and have been since 1994 or so. Pretty eclectic stuff, for people that like the Mind/Body industrial compilations or MuseNet -- perfect for the Slashdot crowd, I figure.
Assuming the mall lets you record something there. A cousin of mine in high school tried to shoot a student movie in our local mall, and the management kicked her out. If they won't even allow THAT...
The point of my comment was that very little is needed to implement proper team communication, and even the 3 simple steps I outlined are usually not present.
Also, those 3 steps can be implemented in the usual case of idiot programmers and clueless management, while your plan requires a somewhat more disciplined and competent sort of place...like a Fortune 100 company.
Based on my experience in the software industry, you don't have to go as far as to pick one of these pre-packaged development ideologies. You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.
(You can see how well I live up to my own standards here.)
To get a team of programmers to work together, one must actually implement the physical communication they need to mesh together and produce something that's greater than the sum of the parts. That means you need a method for bringing new programmers up to speed, and for allowing existing programmers to change projects or to contribute to projects, in a way that doesn't rely on other programmers (especially if those other programmers no longer work there). The three items listed above are all you really need.
The key is to actually do these things...in my 12 years in the software industry, I've seen these things done properly exactly zero times, and was even fired once after the company president told me they were never going to do anything like this, and that it wasn't needed anyway. Eeek.
Well, it's a quote from a George Carlin stand-up comedy bit, and he usually rides the line between insightful and funny...
Of course! We created God...in our image and likeness, no less.
I wouldn't count on that happening any time soon. In my experience, companies don't hire for competence...they seem to want to hire employees that all get along fabulously as they run the company right into the ground.
Look at the rejection letter I posted in my journal for an example of what I'm talking about.
...up yours!
(OK, OK, I'll send Johnny Cash's estate a check for that joke...)
kino edits DV natively. There are a bunch of Linux audio/video editing programs listed here.
You'll probably also want mjpegtools to turn DV into VideoCDs and DVDs.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in their 1978 decision FCC vs. Pacifica Radio Network, found that freedom of speech does not imply freedom of volume. That pretty much covers spam, spim, telemarketing, and junk faxes, as far as I'm concerned, but for some reason the law isn't enforced like that.
That doesn't mean you can't use it! I've cited that Supreme Court decision when writing to ISPs regarding trolls and other net.miscreants, and have had accounts revoked.
...Gadsby is all ready for you. :-)
How about digital video? I'm converting my vast videotape/LaserDisc collection to VideoCD and DVD. I could tie up a 2048-processor Linux-based supercomputer with my video processing.
Making sure all their computers run Linux was a pretty neat trick. And may whatever gods are out there bless them for it.
Seeing as how we're discussing Linux applications and all...how about some URLs for Compressor, Cleaner, or Sonic?
You're either a troll or a dimwit.
That's odd, I spend a LOT of time writing code that ends up in command-line programs. I wonder how I do that, given that you say there's no room for such a thing.
Just take a look on the open-source project where I write the most code, mjpegtools. It's the open-source MPEG2-video (i.e. DVD) creation package. You'll have to look at the CVS version to see my latest contribution, though; it's not officially released yet. It's called y4mdenoise; you can browse the CVS version here. It's a new temporal noise-reduction tool for digital video, that does such a good job of inferring clear images from several noisy examples of them, that it can make a videotape look like it came from a LaserDisc. No kidding.
You remind me of the head of the U.S. Patent Office in 1899, who said that everything that can be invented has been. I wish people like you would get the heck out of the way of people like me.
How will getting everyone to standardize on .NET save Microsoft? An open-source version of it (Mono) already exists, so unless Microsoft's licensing terms are better, I don't see how this will lock people into anything Microsoft-specific.
Perhaps millions of Americans, but it's a big world, and a lot of third-world countries are modernizing on open-source software. I think Microsoft is destined to be an America-only thing, like football.
Maybe this was just a rumor, but I heard that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the Windows NT source code base (meaning W2K and WinXP also) was lifted from FreeBSD. It's also my understanding that FreeBSD allows this sort of thing, so I'm not trying to accuse Microsoft of stealing or anything. But as far as I know, that's one big example of them using OSS in the way you describe.
The real question here is, of course, since FreeBSD is a decent operating system, if Windows NT/2K/XP is 1/4 to 1/3 FreeBSD, what the heck did you guys do to screw it up so badly?
Also, they've started releasing the source code to some of their projects on SourceForge, which may be their way of contributing to innovation.
Disclaimer: I am not a Microsoft fan. Actually, I hate their guts. And that's solely because of their low quality, not their business practices. Actually, I find their "predatory" business practices to be sort of hilariously brilliant.
The forums on ZDNet are filled with pro-Microsoft trollers. People like "No Ax To Grind", "Mike Cox", and "Loverock Davidson" have become infamous with their bizarre pro-Microsoft, anti-Linux messages. They're so out of touch with reality, they come across like some of the pro-terrorist commenters on Saudi Arabia's official news site about 9/11.
OTOH, even Howard Roark had to work in the rock quarry for a while. That's about all that gives me hope these days.
Who is Strauss? I know who Machiavelli is. I'll go buy a book today or tomorrow.
If I'm forced to go down that path, I will make sure I do it so well & so thoroughly, that I'll make Gail Wynand look like a saint. I don't think the world really wants that, even though it deserves that.
...then please, for sanity's sake, buy and read "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines". You will find that Apple actually researched what makes an intuitive interface & then did a damn fine job accomplishing it. The current Linux GUIs suffer from the same problem as Windows; they're completely arbitrary.
I hate when background windows force themselves to the front on MS Windows, and it makes me sick to see that happen under Linux. I hate selecting some bit of text under Windows, only to find that releasing my finger from the button caused some last-second movement that totally screws up my selection. Linux's GUIs do this too. Macintosh knows people are human beings & it filters out last-second movements like that. And so on, and so on, and so on.
So please...if you're going to write a proper Linux GUI...HEED STRONGLY WHAT APPLE SAYS!!!
(Disclaimer: I am a major Linux head, but was once a Mac developer. OS X looks awesome, but unless Apple stops being the sole source of hardware, I'm not buying a Mac.)